That triumvirate of goodies

merely overwhelmed my resolve. You’re probably thinking I’m talking about three yarn-y goodies. No, not today. It’s cold and raining and running the oven is the best way to keep warm. Therefore, yesterday’s dough became today’s big pile o’ cookies:

I have sampled each kind and they are great. The lighter ones are Rum Spice cookies and the darker ones are non-sandwiched Chocolate-Pistachio Sandwich cookies. The chocolate ones are indeed wonderful by themselves so I am not making the frosting to make them sandwich cookies. Note to self: need to crush the pistachios a lot smaller next time. I used a rolling pin to crush them and some bits were still large. The bigger hunks simply fell off the dough and skittered about the kitchen when I sliced off cookies.

Of course, chasing those rogue pistachios gave me an opportunity to practice my sweeping. Does this count as today’s exercise? Probably not. Although when Homer and Marge were Olympic curlers last week this was how Marge warmed up.

Back on track, I did say triumvirate, didn’t I, so here’s the third thing for today. This is a recipe called Milk Chocolate Crunchies that I got from my American grandmother. She and I hoover up a batch of these every time I visit her. Mostly while playing dice and card games.

These go quickly, under half an hour from start to finish, excluding cooling time.

Her recipe calls for milk chocolate chips but I like my chocolate darker (“come to the dark side… we have cookies”) so I went with semi-sweet chips. The peanut butter can be creamy or chunky. I used creamy, half regular peanut butter and half honey peanut butter.

Step 2: Heat until melted:

Step 3: Add 2 cups of quick oats and 1/4 to 1/3 cup slivered almonds. I used toasted slivered almonds. If you keep your oats or almonds in the refrigerator or freezer, you need to let them come to room temperature before tossing them in the chocolate.

Step 4: Stir until well-coated. Turn off the heat on your double-boiler.

Step 5: Drop by tablespoons on wax paper or a cookie sheet. I use cookie sheets. The chocolate is too hot to handle with bare hands so I use a 2-spoon method to scoop and shape the crunchies before dropping them on the sheet. Resist the urge to taste the very hot melted crunchie base. Athk me how I learned thith.

Here are half my crunchies, hot off the spoon. I have no idea why I spaced them. They don’t expand:

Step 6: Put your cookie sheets in a cool location (in my house, that’s anywhere but the top of the oven) so your crunchies can harden. While waiting for that, use the non-sharp utensil of your choice to scrape the remaining few cooled chocolate bits out of your double boiler. Lick the utensil. Yum. Note: this also reduces clean-up.

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Then do a few extra minutes of step aerobics.